The Supreme Court killed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s push to increase the fuel efficiency of New York City’s taxi fleet.

A ruling Monday, in which the high court declined to hear an appeal of an earlier decision, effectively ends the mayor’s four-year legal fight to get the yellow taxi industry to replace its 13,000 vehicles—the vast majority of which are Ford Crown Victorias—with gas-electric hybrids.

The Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, which represents taxi fleet owners, had challenged in court two different Bloomberg administration plans to push the industry to buy hybrids. A federal judge agreed in 2009 that both efforts amounted to usurpations by the city of the federal government’s authority to set emissions standards.

After the Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal of the decision, the Bloomberg said the city would lobby Congress to change the law that the ruling was based on.

“The cities are those that are addressing real-world problems like climate change and energy policy,” the mayor said Monday. “The federal government seems unable to address those issues. We’ve tried to do it.”

Some taxi owners have embraced hybrids; the energy-efficient vehicles now account for one-third of the city’s fleet. But hybrids tend to be used by drivers who own their vehicles.

The fleets that lease to drivers on a per-shift or weekly basis loathe the more efficient vehicles, saying they’re uncomfortable for passengers and unable to stand up to the pounding that yellow taxis take while driving non-stop on city streets.

The fleet owners have been scrambling to buy up Crown Victorias before they go out of production later this year. “We’re still buying as many as we can because we have no alternative,” said Michael Woloz, a spokesman for the MTBOT. Nearly all of the other vehicles approved to be used as city taxis are hybrids.

Woloz said the taxi fleets face a crunch between when the Crown Victoria goes out of production and the planned arrival by 2014 of the city’s specially designed single taxi model, dubbed the “Taxi of Tomorrow.”

The taxi fleet owners want the city to approve the Ford Transit Connect, a small van, for use in the interim. But the TLC says it doesn’t plan to approve any new vehicles before the “Taxi of Tomorrow” hits the road.